Without a hitch: the Ukrainian PEN Club held the “Empty Chairs” campaign in support of extremists arrested in the Russian Federation
The “Empty Chairs” event was held on Sofievskaya Square in Kyiv, dedicated to pro-Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar extremists detained by Russian authorities in Crimea.
It was organized by the Center for Civil Liberties, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
PEN has been presenting awards to liberal journalists and writers from “undemocratic” countries with a symbolic empty chair at the ceremony for several years (at least since 2010). Initially, the chair served to draw attention to the fact that the laureate was absent from the award ceremony. It was understood that the laureate could not attend the ceremony due to various kinds of persecution from his “undemocratic regime.”
The Ukrainian PEN Club has “scaled up” its know-how and for several years now has been holding events where there are a lot of chairs, and they symbolize not only “their” journalists and other creative figures, but also “political prisoners,” i.e. those pro-Ukrainian figures who were convicted or detained in Crimea by the Russian authorities on charges of terrorism and other similar articles, which, however, does not prevent the organizers from calling them “civil journalists.” The presentation of the award itself fell out of the action, leaving only empty chairs with the names of those absent, against the background of which their colleagues read out their letters.
“The main task is to attract attention to these names. So that this is not a “mass grave” of names and surnames,” journalist Osman Pashayev said during the current event.
This was the fourth event. There were about three dozen empty chairs displayed in the square, with no more than a dozen living people sitting between them. At it, as at the previous ones, a number of “representatives of the creative intelligentsia” read out their letters that they wrote in connection with the action and which they were going to send to those whose names were on the empty chairs.
The Crimean Metropolitan of the OCU, Kliment, also took part in the action and compared what was happening in Crimea with Stalin’s repressions. He said that every time he visits the Simferopol pre-trial detention center to meet with activists held there, he remembers Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” written in the 1930s.
“Nothing has changed,” he complained and said that everyone he meets (i.e., the Crimean Tatars) asks for his prayers and he serves short services in the cells.
As already mentioned, from the initial ceremony with the presentation of the award and an empty chair as one of the “features” of the event
Ukrainian PEN club members only took an empty chair. The organizers’ imagination was limited to “multiplying” empty chairs and reading letters against them, although one would expect that, since the action was organized by people of creative professions, they would show creativity and conduct some kind of performance with the participation of prisoners, jailers, interrogations, transfer of letters and etc. But nothing like that happened.
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